The purpose of this research is to examine Sartre’s Existentialism and Human Emotions and de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity. The plan of the research will be to set forth the general pattern of ideas in each work, and then to compare and contrast the means by which the ideas emerge.
The pattern of ideas in Existentialism and Human Emotions is an elaboration of existentialist thought, as both protest against previous modes of philosophical discussion and meditation on the human condition in the modern period. Sartre’s enterprise is to describe in objective terms the philosophical platform of intensely subjective human ontology, or conception of the nature of human being-ness or reality, that existentialism proposes. He then develops an existential interpretation of such being-ness around the familiar subjects of human concern: freedom and responsibility, the …